Author(s)

Yuanfang Qian¹, Jun Hu^2,3, Mu Zhang^3*

¹Jieyang Vocational & Technical College, Jieyang, China.
²Management School, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
³Shenzhen Tourism College of Jinan University, Shenzhen, China.

Social media is playing a more and more important role in the area of online information search. However, few studies are carried out about the matter in China. In the hope of contributing to the study of this subject, the author tends to explore the role of social media in online information search. This research simulates the user’s online travel information search behavior. The author uses Baidu as a search engine and adopts the way of “destination + keywords” as a search model to collect data. Content analysis and multivariate statistical analysis have been used to explore the meanings of the data. This paper finds that social media provides a variety of travel information sources for users, facilitates the restructuring of the tourism information structure and changes the dissemination pattern of the travel information. Countermeasures and suggestions are given on how to provide personalized search results for the online tourists, and how to play the advantages of social media to enhance the tourism enterprises market competitiveness in the future network era.

Tourist, Information Search, Social Media, Social Search

Qian, Y. , Hu, J. and Zhang, M. (2015) Study on the Online Travel Information Search: A Perspective of Social Media. Advances in Applied Sociology, 5, 219-233. doi: 10.4236/aasoci.2015.58021.